Daunting Days of Winter

by Ray Gorham

  “There’s someone I need to see. Hoping he’ll put me up for the night.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Saturday, January 28th

  Montana/Wyoming State Line

  Rose dismounted, then tied the horses to the fence that ran along the highway. She kicked at the snow, scraping some patches of grass bare with her boots so the horses could graze. With her hands on her hips, she stretched from side to side, swinging her arms one way, then the other, trying to work out the kinks in her back.

  Fresh snow drifted from the sky but was fortunately not too heavy, nor was the air too cold, just a few degrees below freezing she guessed. The Montana welcome sign stood fifty feet away, riddled with bullet holes. She studied it and wondered how many people like her had passed it these past five months. Refugees seeking…seeking…her thoughts paused here like they always did. What was it she was seeking? What had the others who had passed through here been seeking?

  She knew what Kyle had been after, and she imagined that had made the journey more bearable for him, but here she was, one week in and still unsure what it was she was expecting. It was the uncertainty that made things difficult, that and not belonging anywhere. At least Kyle had had a home to move towards, a place that, even if his family hadn’t survived, was still his.

  She, on the other hand, was homeless, the smoke she’d seen rising from her little ranch as she escaped through the trees assuring her of that. She was also heading to a place she’d never been, hoping for generosity from a person she’d known for all of five days. What if he wasn’t there, or hadn’t made it, or wouldn’t help? What then?

  What were the other people who passed by here doing? Seeking family? Escaping the cities? Fighting to survive through the winter? For what purpose?

  Blitz whinnied and tugged on the reins. Rose patted the horse on her side, rubbed her nose, and whispered softly. The first two days had been a battle. Blitz didn’t take to being pulled around by another horse nor walking in straight lines for miles on end. At one point, something had spooked her, and she’d broken free, bucking off her load and running away. It had taken Rose two hours to corral the mare, find her things, and repack the load. But as of late, Blitz seemed to be accepting her role without too many more protestations.

  Smokey tore at the grass and chewed noisily, breaking the otherwise eerie silence. Silence was something Rose was finally getting used to. Before, there had always been noise, whether the TV, or radio, the furnace or the fridge, trucks driving by on the freeway, whatever. There was always something. Now it was so quiet you could hear the flow of blood in your ears and the sounds of nature that had been there all along but had been drowned out by the hum of daily life.

  Living alone made the silence worse, a constant reminder that there was no one else there. Even her husband Bruce, as unfaithful and detached as he was, would have been someone to talk to, to listen to, to touch. Solitude was fine if you could call your friend or take a walk through the mall. Even getting spam emails at least let you know someone or something knew you were alive. But enforced isolation, with only a loyal dog and a couple of horses for company, just wasn’t healthy.

  Rose pulled out an MRE Lou had given her, tore it open, and bit off a chunk. It tasted slightly better than mud and had the consistency of cardboard, but she knew it contained the calories she needed, so she forced it down. With her meal complete, such as it was, she put the wrapper back in the pack, took a drink of water, filled a bottle with snow, and readied the horses to head down the road.

  Based on the position of the sun, Rose estimated she had another four or five hours of daylight, and standing still thinking sad thoughts wasn’t going to help, so she turned the horses, mounted up, and crossed into Montana.

  CHAPTER 24

  Sunday, January 29th

  South of Deer Creek

  Kyle stepped out of the shower and dried himself off with a towel that was warm, clean, and smelled fresh. He dressed quickly, brushed his teeth with real toothpaste, combed his hair, and exited the bathroom.

  Brenda Emory was in the kitchen making breakfast while Frank put plates on the table. “Pancakes alright?” she asked.

  “Sounds great,” Kyle answered, putting his newly acquired toothbrush and toothpaste in his pack. “You don’t know how much I appreciate you letting me stay while the weather blew through.”

  “Don’t you mention it. After everything you’ve been through, we’re glad you came here.”

  Kyle had arrived late Friday night, and despite nearly shooting him in the dark, Frank and Brenda had welcomed him warmly and insisted he stay. Saturday’s weather had blown in cold and snowy, and Kyle had been convinced to wait out the weather and leave once things cleared up. By late Saturday afternoon, the system had blown through, leaving three inches of fresh snow and moderate temperatures.

  Kyle spent most of Saturday helping Frank tend to the animals, clean snow from solar panels, and check traps for food, all while catching up on world events. Once back at the house, he was taken on a tour of the back half of the Emory’s mountainside home. Three doors led off of the main room. One accessed their bedroom, another the bathroom, and the third was a steel door that led through a concrete wall to a bunker within a bunker. Bigger and extending further into the hillside than Kyle had expected, the room was self-contained and, according to Frank, set up to get them through two years without leaving. “That,” Frank assured him, “is assuming we don’t kill each other in the meantime.”

  Not only were there several racks of emergency food, categorized by meal and food type, but also barrels of water, in case their spring ran dry, weapons and enough ammo to supply a small army, a HAM radio, cots, body armor, hand generators, surgical supplies, and everything else a person would need to last out the millennium.

  “Why?” Kyle asked, trying to wrap his mind around everything Frank and Brenda had accumulated.

  Frank looked back in disbelief. “You don’t understand, even now?”

  “But what kind of an investment would this take? I mean, there has to be a hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment and supplies here.”

  “That’s close,” Frank said, shutting off the light and leading him back to the living room area. “Why not do this? I couldn’t afford to buy a farm in Chile, or an estate in Australia, so I did what I could. I have no regrets, but I bet you do.”

  Kyle thought of all the things he could have done differently or cut back on. Frank had lectured him before, and Kyle had given some thought since then to what he would have changed. For the most part, they’d lived frugally. But he could still identify a couple hundred dollars a month that could have been used more wisely. “Yeah, I’ve got regrets, now that you mention it.”

  Brenda had been reading a novel during the men’s conversation, but she marked her place and put her book down, then looked at Kyle. “Saving our money to pay for all of this wasn’t that bad, really, and I certainly wasn’t sad when we moved out of the trailer and into the mountain. You always need a place to live, and we just considered our home to be our retirement fund, or 401k, without the tax advantages.”

  “Screw the taxes,” Frank said, smirking at his wife. “My friends were always bragging about how well their Apple or Google stock was doing, and good for them. My stock is in that room,” he jabbed his finger towards the back. “And it’s worth a hell of a lot more today than anything on the NASDAQ.”

  “I don’t think I could have talked my wife into it, to be honest.”

  “Because you never tried, Kyle,” Brenda said, looking over her glasses. “Women are wired to want security and minimize risk. Once Frank explained what he wanted to do, I was sold 100%. We even started doing some things before we found this property – storing food in our apartment, reading literature, doing a community garden, growing tomatoes in a window – just what we could. The garden didn’t produce enough to totally feed us, but I learned how to grow things, how to can food, and we saved money on groceries that we could then put into t
his place.”

  “The Bible never did much for me,” Frank said, leaning forward and waving his arms around for emphasis. “I figured if God was really in The Bible, he’d have made it more interesting. Anyway, the problem with being atheist is you don’t have an afterlife to look forward to. No harps and singing in the next life for me, so I decided to extend this one as long as I can. Thought about cryogenic freezing for about a week, then figured this was a better use of my money.”

  Kyle laughed. “I wish I could blame my lack of preparations on belief in God. It would sound noble, but it’d be a lie. I’m probably like most people, figuring tomorrow will always be like today, which was just like yesterday.”

  “To be honest, my parents thought I was nuts when I married Frank and we started doing all of this prepping. My dad used to ask me if I was in an abusive relationship and Frank was keeping me against my will. Even offered to help me escape.” Brenda rolled her eyes, then continued a bit wistfully. “I hope they’re alright. Dad and Mom live in Phoenix, not a good place to be right now I’m sure.”

  “We stored enough food for our family to survive with us,” Frank explained, “Even though they gave us such a hard time about it, which is why we don’t offer to let you stay permanently. We’re sorry, but we still hope they might find some way to get here. I hope you understand.”

  Kyle nodded. “Don’t apologize. I understand the need to know your family is ok. I’m hoping to find my parents alive and well. They’re up near Sandpoint, Idaho and had been living on teacher’s pensions, so they didn’t have a lot extra. Hopefully they’ve made it so far.”

  Brenda gave Kyle a sympathetic look. “I know how you feel. I worry all the time about my folks, and Frank’s, too. But you have to let people do what they want. My dad loved to golf, and he could do that year round down there. That’s why they stayed in Arizona.”

  “Don’t feel bad, Bren. You know we did our best to convince them to come up here.” Frank looked back at Kyle. “One drawback to doing all this prepping is everyone thinks you’re nuts, even your relatives. Bet they don’t anymore. Built this place to get us through anything – famine, war, EMP, solar flare, pandemic. You name it, we can last it out here, except for maybe a direct hit from a nuclear bomb or an asteroid, you know, global destruction type things. Other than that, we’re covered.”

  Their discussion rambled on for another couple of hours as they enjoyed both the social aspect of the conversation and the verbal repartee. They veered from one subject to another, going from prepping to life in Deer Creek, crime, loneliness, first aid, and a raft of other topics. They segued into Frank’s HAM radio conversations with the outside world and spent the next thirty minutes filling Kyle in on the latest developments.

  Kyle learned that a lot had happened in the five months he’d been out of the loop. Less than twenty-four hours after America had been hit by the EMP, Israel, along with limited elements of American armed forces, had launched a series of pre-emptive strikes, taking down the Iranian, Syrian, and Egyptian governments and militaries in devastating attacks. Cutting off the heads of those repressive regimes had thrown their countries into such severe chaos, that what little was left of their armies had been overwhelmed with the task of regaining some semblance of civil order, a task at which they were so far failing in their efforts.

  In addition to the Israeli attacks, the U.S. was being blamed for a series of targeted cyber attacks against Russian and Chinese regions that headquartered political and military forces. Unable to retaliate in kind since the U.S. had already been crippled, what was still functioning of the Russian and Chinese governments had threatened military strikes as recourse for the attacks. In return, the American President, sensing little value in diplomacy, had dropped a small nuclear bomb over an unpopulated area of Siberia and promised hundreds more if either country made any aggressive moves.

  With the three major powers in the world crippled and trying to regain their footing, multiple regional conflicts had erupted. India and Pakistan had come to blows with a limited nuclear exchange killing tens of millions and leaving untold thousands sure to die from their injuries. With the global economy cratered and U.S. dollars no longer flowing towards the Middle East to prop up their various allies, a schism within the different Muslim sects had also boiled over, leading to a regional war based on religious alliances. Several of the governments, including Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Iraq had fallen, plunging those countries into deeper anarchy and mayhem.

  Israel had been able to avoid the whirlpool of disorder to this point, parking all of its tanks on Israeli borders, mobilizing its reserves, and shooting any and all who approached. The strategy wasn’t popular, but it was effective, and was thus far holding back the growing tide of destruction that surrounded it.

  Europe had not been able to escape unscathed. While Israel hunkered down, many of the highly populated Muslim communities in Europe had risen up in response to the Jewish actions, pushing several countries to the brink of civil war. Eventually martial law had been declared throughout the European Union, and while a few pockets of resistance were still fighting back, it seemed Europe would eventually come out of the conflict comparatively intact.

  The problem was, as Frank pointed out, that with Europe under martial law and dealing with internal threats, they were not in any shape to be of assistance to the United States, so we couldn’t count on them to provide resources that would help us get back on our feet. Germany and Korea had been the source for the majority of the world’s electrical generating equipment, and with Germany now offline, it would take Korea decades to provide even a fraction of what America needed to rebuild.

  To this point, the Southern Hemisphere had been least impacted by the state of world affairs, though with much of the world’s purchasing power in North America and Europe shut down, the ensuing depression had caused massive unemployment, unrest, and misery even there. Due to a combination of factors such as isolation, cultural stability, and national pride, Australia and Japan were the two least affected countries, even though many of their industries outside of agriculture were on the verge of collapse.

  On the American front, conditions were as bad as, if not worse than, much of the world, with the most devastating destruction occurring in the Northeast, stretching from Washington, D.C., to Concorde, N.H. The mortality rate in those areas was nearing 50%, a result of lack of medical care, violence, starvation, and diseases stemming from failed sanitation systems. Combine that with fires that burned through entire neighborhoods, and it seemed that whole portions of the country were turning into massive refugee camps. A few pockets of stability were emerging in the Northeast, but it would likely be the end of summer before any sort of sustainable communities could be re-established. What had once been the economic hub of the world had been reduced, in the course of a few weeks, to a third world region where stealing a potato from a neighbor’s garden could get you shot.

  Other parts of the country were faring better than the Northeast, but most big cities were not too far behind in sinking to third world status. Northern cities, like Chicago, were struggling the most, as harsh weather was added to all their other problems. Southern cities, where a person could more easily survive the winter, uncomfortable as it may be, were fortunate to have less densely populated regions, allowing people room to grow food. The cities in the South also had sizeable agricultural regions that produced crops year round, in many instances, providing enough food to subsist on, even if it made for a one-dimensional diet.

  To the West, the worst locations to be in were Phoenix and Las Vegas, primarily due to water shortages. To this point, the climate in those areas had been beneficial, but the absence of rain and the dependence on water treatment and pumping facilities that no longer worked resulted in the worst misery. Southern California was also a bad place to be, but mostly because of the human factor. Sanitation and violence were causing the greatest number of deaths, with many areas in the cities now armed camps, at war with nei
ghboring gangs over control of limited resources.

  From a national perspective, the Pacific Northwest was the only region in the country that could be described in any sense as having survived well the affects of the attack. The weather, though harsh at times, was survivable. Population density, outside of the Portland and Seattle areas, was tolerable. And, the region was naturally rich with agriculture, abundant wildlife, water, ranching, fishing, and a host of other resources that made survival more likely than not.

  Throughout the country there were areas that ran counter to the trends, but as a whole, that was the disposition of the nation and the world in general, according to Frank and based on information gleaned from his HAM radio conversations.

  Kyle came away from the discussion mildly depressed at the state of the country, and while he wasn’t too surprised, hearing about it from someone who wasn’t just speculating or repeating rumors was discouraging. Cut off from the rest of the world and focused on your own survival, it was easy not to think about what others were going through, then hard to hear that it was so bad. The only bright spot from his discussion with Frank was finding out that they were faring well in comparison to the rest of the country, which hopefully meant that he and his parents would have a better than average chance of surviving once he made it to them.

  Conversation continued while Kyle and the Emorys ate their breakfast of pancakes with real maple syrup, fried eggs, and toast with jam, all flavors that had long been absent from Kyle’s diet. Life for Frank and Brenda, from a convenience standpoint, didn’t seem to be very different from life before the event. Daily routines had changed, and they were physically cut off from others, but they didn’t worry about food, or heat, or water, or, most importantly, about tomorrow.